In the Dark Ages immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, I started programming in GW-BASIC and 8086 assembly language, though I never earned a dime from it and made my living piling mud randomly in fields for the local lord. Shortly after this, I got my first professional job prognosticating in Delphi. Centuries later, as the Black Plague swept the land, I became a Microsoft programmer, steeped in the arcane lore of C++, COM, ATL, and sometimes VB6, but at least I was getting paid. Much later there came a Renaissance, and I discovered C#, .NET, and SQL Server.

But now I live in a true Age of Enlightenment: Ruby, Mac OS X, Linux, bash, Xcode, Objective-C, Swift, Haskell, PostgreSQL, and so much more.